Lunch Time Rant...

begin rant

Articles such as this one piss me off to no end. Classic piece of FUD produced by some undereducated marketing drones for a near do well company. Pathetic!

Anyone can easily spot that this was neither written by a developer, nor designed for one to read. As usual, FUD is targetted at the clueless management dopes who are ignorant enough to swallow it. Hence, the article makes use of some nice looking percentages, statistics, and picturesque rethoric. People without brain like preaty numbers - especially ones with the % char appended to them. Of course if you actually do have a working brain, you probably already know that any embeded statistical information is useless if taken out of context.

Andas usual, the author does not even bother to try see the case from a developers point of view. Having stuff in public domain is good! IP and patents just do not make any sense in the Software world. Its just grounds for frivolous lawsuits, corporate powerplay. If you are a developer, more often than not you want to share your ideas with others, exchange knowledge and etc...

Information should be free - we should sell products not ideas. This way more attention can be put into creating satisfying end-product rather than a crafty EULA and activation scheme.

Developers benefit from the free exchange of ideas, public benefits because of the avaliability of cheep alternative solutions. Companies benefit because they can cut down on stupid licensing costs and actually invest in producing something usefull...

The only person that does not benefit from free software is some sad prick who has a buggy, sucky, never-updated, overpriced product who claims to holds IP for the if statement or something even more ridiculus...

God, how could we be so blind. All this time we were thinking that IT industry has trouble lately because of the economy crisis, the aftermath of .com boom, and the resulting oversaturation of the IT job market. We were thinking this was just a bad knee-jerk reaction of corporate world to massive budget cuts caused by the recession.

Nope - apparently all of it can be traced to the academic community, and open source enthusiasts who like to share their ideas.

If we only had known earlier that all this trouble was actually caused by free software!

Nasty, stupid FUD! Give me a break...

end rant